⚑ The chapter's heaviest verse, and the fourth `תּוֹרָה`. Read the translation note at 28:4 first.
Quick answer
A man who refuses to listen and still expects to be heard is the figure here. The verse is about that specific contradiction, and it is not a mechanism for switching prayer off.
Read both lines
The picture in the first line is deliberate: he turns away his ear, an act, not a failure of attention. Something was being said and he moved. Then the second line's even is doing the work, and it signals surprise: of all the things that might be affected, even this one is.
What the verse has noticed is a contradiction rather than a penalty. A man who has decided in advance not to hear anything is nevertheless asking to be heard, and the asymmetry is the offense. He wants the relationship to run one direction only. Isaiah describes the same scene at length and, importantly, supplies the setting: "even though you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood," followed immediately by the remedy, which is not more prayer but "Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow" (1:15–17). The problem was never the praying. It was the deafness toward the people the instruction was protecting.
What it does not mean
This verse is not a description of how prayer works, and it must not be used to tell anyone that God is refusing to hear them. Prayer in the New Covenant is communion, access to a Father, not a transaction with conditions attached to it, and no proverb converts it into an account that can be suspended for non-compliance. A believer who feels unheard is not being handed a diagnosis by this verse.
Three uses have to be ruled out plainly. It is not a tool for auditing a suffering person's obedience. It is not an explanation for unanswered prayer, which this book never undertakes to give. And it is not evidence that anyone's standing before God depends on how well they are listening this week, since that standing was settled somewhere else entirely. What the verse describes is a posture, held deliberately, by a man who has not asked for help and does not intend to take any.
Related: Proverbs 28:4 · Isaiah 1:15–17 · Proverbs 15:8 · Proverbs 15:29 · Proverbs 21:13
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.